For me, the cover artwork of a game was always part of the experience. It's partly why I never really engaged with the industrial level of piracy that was rife in my school; I saw games as a complete package. I wanted to enjoy that ritual of choosing a game, taking it home, then studying the cover and the inlay while it was loading.

It's a lost joy; nowadays games either feature dull, identikit, photorealistic covers, or don't even have a cover because you've downloaded them from an online "shop".

Admittedly, it's fair to say that there were a lot of terrible games covers back in the day, but the truth is I'd still take one bad 1980s cover over 90% of modern ones. 

Roger Tissyman - ha ha, funny name - worked on somewhere between 20 and 30 game covers back in the 1980s, yet his name is barely known. This is despite the fact he was responsible for one of the most iconic game covers of all time; Jet Set Willy.

Sadly, Roger is no longer with us, having passed away in 1991, but his artwork lives on. Here is a brief celebration of the idiosyncratic work he did as house artist for Software Projects.

You know what I want? A new Miner Willy game.

It might seem a trifle perverse to desire a reboot for a series which choked to death on a frond some 35 years ago - unless you count NumFun's terrible 2005 phone racer Jet Set Racing - but Miner Willy is, arguably, the greatest British video games character of all time. After Lara Croft, who  - let's face it - these days is British in accent only. 

How can I make such a ridiculous assertion? Because games have become homogenised and safe, and there was nothing safe about Miner Willy.

Try and think of another British games character who is as iconic, or has endured, to the degree Miner Willy has. He is - or was on his way to becoming - our very own Mario or Sonic. What's more, his games had a personality all their own - a wry, uniquely British, sense of humour, filtered through the cracked, unhinged, worldview of the young Matthew Smith.  Even the character's name was a double-entendre, the game's humour being a weird blend of Carry On, Python and satire; the surreal mixed with the mundane. 

How much better would the world be if Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that Jumpman's real name was, I dunno, Huge J'bottom, or Max Johnson, or Buster Hardy.

Sega Toys released a number of quirky products in the 1990s. This week, Mr Biffo and Paul Gannon get to grips with one of them - plus A CAT JUMPS ON THE DESK!!!!!

Back when I was first writing Digitiser, something myself and Mr Hairs were keen to stay away from was the cult-of-personality thing which most games mags of the day engaged in.

I mean, it backfired completely - giving ourselves ridiculous names, in response to a reader's query, was meant to be flippant, and yet they stuck. And here I am 26 years later still calling myself Mr Biffo.

At the age of 22 - the age I was when I started writing Digitiser - I was possessed of a slightly forced cynicism, but in reality that was mixed with a little bit of envy. We acted like we thought games journalists who plastered their photos - or, worse, cartoons of themselves - all over their magazines were tawdry attention-seekers.

In reality, we didn't care as much as we made out, but so far did my self-depreciation go back then that I didn't dare do anything which might've appeared like I wanted anybody to know who I was. It went so deep that even though Digi was written by individuals, we adopted a collective "we" when it came to any opinion.

It was ridiculous really. Just another way for us to strut around like we were better than everyone else. I mean, the games journos-as-celebrities thing never bothered me when I was on the outside of the industry. I liked feeling I was getting to know the writers of my favourite magazines.

​It was only when I accidentally became one of them - albeit writing for Teletext, "The scrag-end of journalism", as we used to say - that I felt uncomfortable drawing too much attention to myself. But that might've been because, on a barely conscious level, I believed I didn't deserve to be one of them. 

GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

One snag with videogaming is that regardless of the topic, the word ‘game’ itself often conjures up ideas of playful excitement and enjoyment – like the happy, smiling funsters you get on boardgame boxes, all sat around having a jolly time poking each other with Ker-Plunk sticks or trying to work out why so many faces in Guess Who? look like a poorly disguised Julian Assange.
 
Films and books don’t have this problem, of course, as both are just the name of the delivery device, not a description of what you’re getting in itself. If you say “I’m going to the cinema to watch a film”, no one is any the wiser as to whether it’ll be a happy film, sad film, thrilling film, or complete waste of £10 and 2 hours you’ll never get back – you know, like the dreary-arsed DC comic book movies (and THAT WAS A JOKE before anyone writes in).
 
Games, though, come saddled with some expectation of what you’re going to get and how they’re going to make you feel built in because they’re ‘games’. Which might be why some people still dismiss storytelling in gaming as immature by default – they inherently think they’ll only ever get something light, shallow and frothy.
 
But this isn’t 1982 anymore, and the narratives possible in gaming have moved on a bit from ‘help Bumbo collect dragon eggs from the haunted cave for his monster custard factory’.
 
Stories in games aren’t always happy ones. Or easy ones. And as a consequence, sometimes calling a game a ‘game’ is almost unfairly trivialising it. Because of course you can still appreciate something and very much enjoy the experience of it, and feel better for having had that experience, without it being a laugh a minute or an action-packed thrillfest.
 
Which brings us to Gris.

I can't keep up with games anymore. I think that if I was still writing Digitiser - as per its original plan to cover the entire breadth of gaming - I'd be lost. Indeed, if we were faced with covering it, just with the two-man - and later three-man - team we originally began with, we'd have no chance.

It's one of the biggest changes I've witnessed over the course of my years writing about games, and the primary reason that Digitiser The Show chose to focus mostly on old games, mainly from the era that I was writing Digitiser for Teletext.

It's not so much about nostalgia as being practical. I can do old games, and talk about them with a degree of confidence that I know what I'm saying. I often worry when I touch on newer stuff - especially the sort of games which come laden with a passionate fanbase - that I'm going to put my foot in it. And by "it" I mean a deep trough of nerd effluence. 

Part of the challenge of writing about games these days, and keeping a handle on developments across the industry, is the size of games. I'm not just talking about the literal size of them - the big open worlds of Far Cry and the like - but the way in which the fanbase will build upon them, these communities springing up around the outskirts like shanty towns. 

Back in the day, I could be confident of my opinion on something like, say, Sonic & Knuckles after three or four hours of play. I'd get that done, move onto Cannon Fodder, for example, then clock that in a few more hours. Games - and being a games journalist - was manageable. 

Now, I don't have a clue about half the things I read, and need to take two weeks off work to review something. 

What's more important than critical acclaim? Moneyyyyyyyyy! 

You may have heard the news that Respawn Entertainment - now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts Global Megacorp Inc. - has released a free-to-play battle royale game entitled Apex Legends. It is, apparently, set in the Titanfall universe, but without the Titans which gave that franchise its name. That would be why they've given it that meaningless, self-consciously cool-sounding, focus group-tested, title.

Here are some alternatives they might like to consider for their next game:

Apogee Cusp
Zenith Saga
Lethal Salvation
Hostility Crusade
Fallen Void
Warfighting Skirmish
Hostility Conflict
Atomic Sheath
Cacophony Bong
Ephemeral Clash
Intrinsic Champions
Magnum Honk
Flocculent Sods

Frankly, put any screenshot of Apex Legends next to one from EA's next big release, Anthem, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart. Whatever happened to games having their own identity?! But that's okay, because people don't like to be startled by new and interesting things. They just want to be spoon-fed the same old lukewarm roadkill ad infinitum, apparently.

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE
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If there's one thing we all secretly love, it’s bashing the ruddy heck out of 3D geometric shapes with some sort of rod or staff. Why just last week I smacked an oxo cube so hard with a chopstick it turned into a brown mist, and it’s the best time I’ve had in ages!
 
And now, thanks to Beat Saber, you don’t have to do your shameful polygon mauling in secret in your shed or lavatory – you can do it in the comfort of your lounge in virtual reality, with the added bonus of obscuring the faces of your disapproving family as you do so!
 
Beat Saber is ostensibly a rhythm game, but to me is more like a Tetris-esque experience. A game so absurdly simple and yet so absolutely spot on and finely tuned, you’ll both adore it and be furious you didn’t think of it yourself and sell the idea to a developer in equal measure.
 
Cubes of one of 2 colours (red or blue) advance towards you, and you have to hit said cubes with either your matching red or blue lightsaber in the direction shown on the cube by an arrow. That’s essentially it – there are some obstacles to dodge, bombs to avoid, cubes with arrows that disappear and such, but the core gameplay is as straightforward as it gets.